I haven’t been inside Second Life in some time, since several updates ago, because my computer would inevitably crash. Now, it’s a reasonably new(ish) computer, and I hadn’t had any troubles in Second Life until then. I figured eventually somebody else would establish a client, and maybe (just maybe) I could go back inside. There are a couple of clients out there that do let you login to Second Life, but they don’t display the graphical interface (which, for a 3d world, is kinda the whole point). I began to despair that I would never get back inside…

Today I tried out the OnRez viewer from the Electric Sheep Company. It worked beautifully on my Toshiba Celeron, 1.5 Ghz with 750 mb of ram. Now, one thing to be aware of with the OnRez viewer is that it was developed partly as a tie in with that CSI-New York episode a week or two ago (featuring an assassin called ‘Venus’).  So you get a bunch of bumf tied into that, though you can detach the CSI HUD and wander off on your own into SL.  It is also geared to make shopping easier in SL. Some folks on the Second Life Education list find that disquieting, but for my immediate problem – getting back into SL – it solved whatever the problem was.

Then I wandered over to the Sloodle project, since I hadn’t been there in a while. I tried their HUD out, which allows the user to blog directly from SL into their blog page on Moodle. That too worked very well (with the OnRez viewer, it should be noted). It was a nice clean interface, though it timed out on me fairly quickly. It’s more twitter-like than a blog like. Once you are wearing it, and you click on the ‘blog’ button, it prompts you to enter the title of your post into the chat box. Then, it prompts you to enter the text of your post into the chat box. And voila. Posted directly onto your Moodle blog page.

Voice chat has been enabled since I was last in SL, but not wanting to push my luck, I didn’t try it out today…

(the Parioli sim in SL, looking suspiciously like the Piazza Navona)